00:00:00 Music Transition Dark Materia’s “The Picard Song,” record-scratching into a Sisko- centric remix by Adam Ragusea. Picard: Here’s to the finest crew in Starfleet! Engage. [Music begins. A fast-paced techno beat.] Picard: Captain Jean-Luc Picard, the USS Enterprise! [Music slows, record scratch, and then music speeds back up.] Sisko: Commander Benjamin Sisko, the Federation starbase... Deep Space 9. [Music ends.] 00:00:15 Ben Host Welcome to The Greatest Generation: Deep Space Nine. It’s a Star Harrison Trek podcast about Deep Space Nine from a couple of guys who are a little bit embarrassed to have a Star Trek podcast. I’m Ben Harrison 00:00:25 Adam Host I’m Adam Pranica. Pranica 00:00:28 Ben Host Hey! 00:00:29 Adam Host Heeeyyy! Ben, correct me if I’m wrong, but I feel like today’s episode is the first sports episode of Star Trek maybe we’ve ever gotten, right? 00:00:42 Clip Clip [Triumphant, up-tempo music plays, in the style of 1940’s radio.] Jim McKay (ABC’s Wide World of Sports): The human drama of athletic competition. [The music quickly fades out.] 00:00:44 Clip Clip Azetbur (Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country): The very name is racist. 00:00:49 Clip Clip [The triumphant radio music fades in again.] Jim McKay: This is ABC’s Wide World of Sports. 00:00:53 Adam Host And that—I’m not talking about a fake sport like, uh- 00:00:56 Ben Host Right. Parrises Squares. 00:00:58 Adam Host Like—like whatever Bashir and Kira played in the holosuite that one time. I’m talking about a real sport, a real, earthly sport. 00:01:06 Ben Host A real sport that real people practice, like anbo-jyutsu [beat]. 00:01:12 Adam Host I… [Ben chuckles.] I’d play anbo-jyutsu right now. I—I— 00:01:17 Ben Host With the blast shield down, I can’t see anything! 00:01:20 Adam Host I’d play anbo-jyutsu against my father. [Ben laughs.] Now more than ever. Ben, this is— 00:01:28 Ben Host Oh, boy. 00:01:29 Adam Host This is an opportunity. I feel like over the years, uh, I’ve made some both thinly and not-very-thinly veiled remarks about your specific sports history and what I—what I believe it to be. 00:01:44 Ben Host [Chuckling] Uh-huh. 00:01:45 Adam Host But I thought maybe—maybe for the open today, you and I could talk about, uh, just what our sports experience has been, uh— 00:01:54 Ben Host Oh, sure! 00:01:55 Adam Host —growing up and up to now. I think that might make for some interesting chat. 00:01:59 Ben Host Yeahhh. 00:02:00 Adam Host Couple of high-performance athletic machines here on the mic. 00:02:05 Ben Host Taut, sinewy podcasters such as ourselves. 00:02:09 Adam Host Yeah. 00:02:10 Ben Host Well, I played a lot of different sports growing up. I—I was always in team sports from kindergarten on. I was a—I played soccer when I was a little kid, and, um— 00:02:21 Adam Host I think—I think a lot of kids played soccer, right? Like, that might have been the entry point into sport for most littles. 00:02:28 Ben Host Yeah. Well it’s a nice, uh—it’s a—it’s a nice sport for a little, ‘cause really all you need equipment-wise is for your mom to take you to the weird soccer store and get some shin guards and cleats. But, you know, beyond that— 00:02:40 Adam Host I did like the feel of those shin guards. The, uh—the—the spring to the sponge of the foam— 00:02:46 Ben Host Yeah, yeah. 00:02:47 Adam Host —on the—on the part that touches your shin. I really liked picking at that. That was— 00:02:52 Ben Host I remember being fascinated at the, like, layer of dry skin that I could, like, scrape away with a fingernail when I took the shin guards off. You know? 00:03:01 Adam Host [Whispers] Oh, that is so nasty. 00:03:05 Ben Host [Chuckles] It was delicious, Adam. 00:03:07 Adam Host Uh, little kid soccer, a great tucker-out-the-kids sport, too, right? 00:03:12 Ben Host Oh, yeah. 00:03:13 Adam Host Just running and running and running. 00:03:14 Ben Host Yeah. Uh, let’s see. Then I was—after the, uh, smash-hit motion picture The Mighty Ducks, got into ice hockey for several years. 00:03:25 Adam Host I can’t believe this! I—it—every—every day with your podcasting partner, you want to make sure it feels like the first time. 00:03:34 Ben Host [Laughs] Yeah, you wanna— 00:03:35 Adam Host I— 00:03:36 Ben Host —you wanna—every time you heat up the mic to feel like the first date [chuckles]. 00:03:39 Adam Host I love that I’m still finding things out about you. This is great. Hockey. You’re a tall. I think a lot of people would—would call you that. 00:03:47 Ben Host Yeah. 00:03:48 Adam Host How—were you a—were you fast, tall, bloomer? Like, were you tall for the kids you age? 00:03:53 Ben Host I was always, like, one of the tallest kids in my class. 00:03:56 Adam Host Mm-hmm. 00:03:57 Ben Host Uh, I was never the tallest. Like, never once in my entire elementary-through-high-school experience was I the tallest kid in my class. But, um— 00:04:07 Adam Host Did you have crazy growth spurts? 00:04:09 Ben Host I did. But I didn’t stop growing ’til I was like 25. Like, I— 00:04:13 Adam Host That’s so fucking crazy. 00:04:14 Ben Host —I was, like 6’2” when I graduated high school and I’m 6’4” now. 00:04:18 Adam Host [Ben makes a few affirming sounds as Adam speaks.] My wife and I have been watching the Jordan documentary. And one of the—like, there’s a lot that’s funny about that doc. Like, there’s—there’s comedy peppered throughout. And one of the biggest laughs that it got out of me was, like, Jordan goes to college at like, 6’3”, goes away for the summer, and comes back five inches taller. [Ben laughs heartily.] I don’t know how that happens. I— 00:04:42 Ben Host Geeze. 00:04:43 Adam Host —as far as I know, I stopped growing my senior year of high school. 00:04:46 Ben Host Yeah. I mean, I was— 00:04:47 Adam Host Vertically, anyway. 00:04:48 Ben Host —I was an awkward boy. I think—I think my feet stopped growing when I was, like, 10-and-a-half. So, I have size 13 feet, and I was probably, like, 5’6” when my feet got to size 13. 00:05:02 Adam Host Can I ask you a question? Uh, when I was growing, I sort of never thought I would stop. And so, like, at least in my household, you always—you’re buying for a size up to get that—that product longevity in shoes, in pants, in shirts. I have—I stopped growing, but I kept getting bigger clothes, expecting that to happen. Was there a moment in your childhood where—where, like, you outpaced the— the growth in—in shoe and shirt size— 00:05:34 Ben Host Wow. 00:05:35 Adam Host — and at that point you’re like, “Whoa, I gotta—now, everything is too big for me and I look crazy.” 00:05:40 Ben Host You know, it’s—like, you saying this is kind of blowing my mind right now, because I have always wondered why it took me so long—like, I was in, like, my mid-to-late twenties before I figured out what sizes of clothes even fit me. 00:05:55 Adam Host Exactly the same. Yeah. 00:05:57 Ben Host And I have always ascribed that to the kind of late 90s fashion of wearing too-big of clothes. You know, big—big, baggy pants— 00:06:07 Adam Host Mm-hmm. 00:06:08 Ben Host —and shirts where the—where the seam is way down off the shoulder. 00:06:11 Clip Clip Elaine Benes (Seinfeld, “The Puffy Shirt”): You can’t come out dressed like that! You’re all puffed up! 00:06:15 Ben Host And I never made the connection that it was probably also partly that as a kid it was just—I—like—we were firing at a moving target every time we bought clothes for me. 00:06:27 Adam Host It was shopping for value, every time. 00:06:30 Ben Host Yeah,. 00:06:31 Adam Host Every back-to-school sale was—was, like, “Can we squeeze another year out of this?” [Ben chuckles warmly.] Yeah. That really influenced—that had to influence the style for kids our age. And—like you—that was something that stuck with me through college and into my first job.